Personalization

in Practice:
Observations from the Field
WCER Working Paper No. 20158
December 2015

Rich Halverson, Al Barnicle, Sarah Hackett, Tanushree Rawat,

Julia Rutledge, Julie Kallio, Curt Mould, and Janice Mertes
University of WisconsinMadison
rich.halverson@wisc.edu

Wisconsin Center for Education Research

School of Education University of WisconsinMadison http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/
Halverson, R., Barnicle, A., Hackett, S., Rawat, T., Rutledge, J., Kallio, J., Mould, C., & Mertes, J. (2015).
Personalization in Practice: Observations from the Field (WCER Working Paper 2015-8). Retrieved from
University of WisconsinMadison, Wisconsin Center for Education Research website:
http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/publications/workingPapers/papers.php

Personalization in Practice:
Observations from the Field
Rich Halverson, Al Barnicle, Sarah Hackett, Tanushree Rawat, Julia Rutledge,
Julie Kallio, Curt Mould, and Janice Mertes
Personalized learning places the interests and abilities of learners at the center of their
education experience. In personalized learning, educators develop environments in which
students and teachers together build plans for learners to achieve both interest-based and
standards-based goals. In 2014, a number of foundations gathered together to develop a working
definition of personalized learning that included four components:

competency-based progression that defines trajectories of content for learners and

provide ongoing, formative assessment toward learning;

flexible learning environments organized around the needs of students;

personal learning paths that customize activities to learner motivations and goals; and

learner profiles to capture the progress students make toward learning goals. (Education
Week, 2014)

Educators have used ideas like these to develop personalized learning environments in public
and private schools across the country. Personalized learning is the latest in a series of designs
aimed at organizing schooling around learner interest. As is true with many similar ideas, the
diversity of designs, models, and implementations means that personalized learning has come to
mean different things to different communities. It is used, for example, to refer to computeradaptive learning, virtual learning, blended learning, data-driven learning, differentiated learning,
and 1:1 technology plans (e.g., American Institutes for Research, 2013; Gates Foundation, 2010;
Grant & Basye, 2014; & Abbott et al., 2014). This variety of uses describes a fertile domain of
innovation that has grabbed the attention of educators and policy makers around the world who
are committed to improving teaching and learning for all students.
One common approach to studying an innovation mid-bloom is to engage in descriptive
research about how the emerging practices are actually being performed in cutting-edge
environments. This research strategy helps the field begin to map how the ideas are taken up by
educators (e.g., District Reform Support Network, 2014). It also provides some contrast between
the ambitious plans of reformers and actual practices of teachers and students in schools in order
to help reformers refine their ideas and to open up new avenues for change. Finally, this
approach begins to identify indicators of practice that can guide innovation on the ground and
help educators and policy makers alike develop assessment tools that measure the degree to
which strategies improve learning.

Personalization in Practice

Our report summarizes the early findings of a study to document the practices of
personalized learning across a dozen Midwestern K12 public schools. Our approach is to talk to
teachers, students, and parents in the schools, visit the learning environments, and observe
practices of teaching and learning so that we can develop a sense of how the principles of
personalized learning are lived day to day.
Researchers from the University of WisconsinMadison School of Education worked with
leaders at the Institute for Personalized Learning (IPL)1 to identify a number of K12 schools
with experience implementing principles of personalization. This research report presents the
initial findings of a 6-month research project designed to document what personalized learning
looks like in contemporary K12 schools.
Site Selection
Our study focuses on the five schools (Table 1) that participated in a pilot version of the
study conducted in Spring 2015 (all pseudonyms).
Table 1. Schools Observed
Name
Anderson
Balsam
Carson
Delaney
Edison

Type Location Students Teachers

HS
HS
MS
MS
ES

Urban
Suburban
Suburban
Suburban
Urban

1000
150
100
800
450

35
10
3
50
30

Free &
Reducedprice Lunch
60%
20%
40%
20%
50%

Anderson High School is a large school in an urban community with a challenging
academic program. Its personalized learning initiative is designed to support student success in
the program, located in a lab that features computer-adaptive learning tools and regular
consultation with faculty and peers. Approximately 50% of Anderson students participate in the
personalized learning program.
Balsam High School is an arts-based charter school-within-a-school located in a suburban
high school. Students work with teachers to design classes and develop proficiency-based
learning programs in the schools learning management system. Balsam students are expected to
develop senior projects that involve inquiry, social engagement and learning technology in a
public performance space.
Carson Middle School is a small school-within-a-school set in a traditional suburban middle
school. The three Carson faculty members work with students to develop personalized learning

IPL provides workshops and guidance to schools about how to create personalized learning environments around a
set of design principles organized in a honeycomb model. The model describes strategies for educators to build
personalized learning around collaboratively designed learner profiles, learning paths, and proficiency-based
progress measures. (http://www.cesa1.k12.wi.us/institute/designdevelop/personalized-learning.cfm)

Personalization in Practice

plans that allow students flexibility in choosing the pace and pathway for learning. The Carson
learning environment, adapted from a storage space in the middle school, has couches, desks,
and open areas for students to design learning opportunities.
Delaney Middle School is a large science and technology based charter school in a suburban
community. Delaney is organized around project-based learning in which students are expected
to learn the content and skills necessary to complete long-term design-based projects. While
there are a number of traditional classes, flexible teacher and classroom schedules allow students
to learn what they need in order to complete the program.
Edison Elementary School is a medium-sized traditional urban elementary school.
Educators at Edison help young learners develop the skills and practices necessary to organize
their own learning processes. Edison integrates computer-adaptive learning, curriculum tools,
and new media devices into designing learning activities in which students are expected to
provide direction and critique.
Questions and Key Findings
This report is built around the three key domains of learners, teachers, and technology. We
selected questions to explore several ideas represented in the IPL theory of action, as well as the
defining themes of personalized learning as identified by prior research. These questions, of
course, are not intended to either define or exhaust possibilities of personalized learning in
practice. We hope they serve as an on-ramp to a broader account of the innovative practices
engaged in by the IPL schools. The central questions and findings that guide this report are:
1. How do IPL schools encourage students to be active participants in their learning?
Educators in the IPL schools attempt to create a culture of agency by designing opportunities
for students (with educators) to collaboratively control the time, pace, space, place, content and
goals of their learning.
2. How do IPL schools shift the role of educators to support personalization? IPL schools
enable educators to engage in regular, data-driven consultation with students to construct
learning pathways and set learning goals.
3. How are learning technologies used in IPL schools? IPL schools develop socio-technical
ecologies, that is, environments where technologies are selected by educators to address the
interests and needs of all learners. The ecologies have three dimensions:
1. all schools provide information technologies that allow students to coordinate and
document learning processes and outcomes;
2. all schools provide computer-adaptive assessment and curriculum programs that
individuate skill and content development learning in math and reading;

Personalization in Practice

3. some schools create digital media spaces to foster creativity in activities such as gaming,
coding, performance, production and making.
The following sections detail how we answered our research questions.2 We found evidence
of the four characteristics of personalized learningprogressions, flexible learning
environments, pathways and profilesdescribed above. We found students and teachers coconstructing learning goals and pathways around student interests and learning standards;
students engaged in independent and self-organized group learning; and educators engaged in
conferences with students on the process of learning as well as discussing goals and
improvement data. We saw how educators used technologies to organize assessment data and
how students used technologies to chart and record learning paths.
Most importantly, we found a common pedagogical commitment to personalized learning
across the IPL schools. This shared vision of teaching and learning framed the practices to
provide students with agency over their learning, the interactions of teachers and students, and
the selection and use of technologies. One teacher commented that, at Balsam, personalization
is setting a unique goal for every student and then setting competencies that align to that goal. A
Anderson High teacher remarked that the role of the learner is to determine goals based on
student needs, interests, learning styles and career goals, and to develop the individual paths to
reaching them. The commitment to a core pedagogy of student ability to design, track and
assess a learning program pervades the observations we made at the IPL schools. This is not to
say that schools are places where anything goes for students. Perhaps the commitment to
personalized learning as a structured learning environment is best described by a leader who
described how Carson teachers are really intentional about the fact that we give freedom within
fences. The concept of freedom within fences describes how IPL schools create a culture in
which students and educators are oriented toward learning outcomes while also open to student
agency. Although what counts as a fence and what constitutes freedom varies across the schools,
achieving the balance between freedom and fences is a defining characteristic of the IPL schools
in the study.
Question 1: How Do IPL Schools Encourage Students
to Be Active Participants in Their Learning?
A central challenge in enabling students to take control of their learning is to create a space
where student choice is expected. In the context of everyday schooling, creating a culture of
student ownership can be more involved than it first appears. Schools have a well-deserved
reputation for overlooking student interest and building routines that require learners to comply
with the program provided by the school. The ability of students to express their interests, much
less the ability to act upon interests, evaporates in many school environments. Many schools lock
down student choice into routines, fearing the chaos or disengagement that may ensue when
students are left to make their own choices.

For more detail on the research methods, nature of the data, and coding process, see the Appendix.

Personalization in Practice

In the IPL schools, we observed a multi-dimensional effort by educators to encourage the

engagement of interest in learning by increasing the range of agency students have over their
work. The commitment to increase the range of student control over their learning stemmed from
the pedagogical vision of the school. As a Balsam teacher explained:
if you have a framework to move students through their competencies you have the
ability to personalize for every student. You have to get out of seat time to do that. So
personalized learning and competency based go hand and hand.
Agency reflects a learners ability to control the pace, place, means and ends for learning.
Learners with agency are motivated to succeed in their learning, can frame the next challenges in
their path, and can persist when faced with difficulties. The educators in our IPL schools talked
about scaffolding opportunities for students to embrace their agency and building on the
emerging culture of student agency, with small steps, to begin to define new routines around
which learning could occur.
Educators in the IPL schools took a number of steps to design what we call a culture of
agency that invited students to take ownership of their learning process. In practice, this meant
allowing students more control over the (a) time and pace of their learning, (b) physical and
social space in which learning could occur, and (c) content learned. The next sections highlight
the stepping off points at which educators built opportunities for students to take control.
A. Agency over the Time and Pace of Learning
The first challenge faced by many of the educators toward building a culture of student
agency was to create learning environments that allowed students to take control of the time and
pace of their learning. In our research on the spaces in which learning took place, we observed
that these efforts occurred at two levels: (1) designing the master schedule, and (2) designing
opportunities for students to take responsibility for organizing their time.
Designing the master schedule. The master schedule is a critical organizing structure at
any school. In personalized learning environments, students may be doing different things
at any moment in timelearning looks different for every student. Each school designed
the master schedule to provide some flexibility for students to allocate how they could
spend time in the school. Three of these are outlined next.
Delaney Middle School built a daily flex period for students into its block schedule design.
The flex period called on students to find their own space to work, collaboratively or
independently, or visit with teachers. A former administrator of Delaney describes how:
the intention [of flex time] was to provide students the opportunity to engage and
organize in their own learning. At first, students went wild, and teachers doubted
whether this was possible. Over time, however, students learned how to know what they

Personalization in Practice

needed and teachers learned to reach out individually, both sides figuring out what to do
with this unstructured time.
A Delaney student comments that, one thing I really like is the availability that teachers
have. So we have flex time and they are available there to help you if you dont understand
something. Flex time became a structural first step in creating a learner-centered culture at
Delaney.
In the Anderson High personalized learning program, students determine the time, place and
pace of their learning. Students choose from a menu of learning goals in a computer adaptive
learning platform and have control over how to complete what they need to complete. Because
the program is available online, students can choose to login outside of school hours to complete
their work and are often documented completing minor and major milestones in early morning
hours. Teachers use log files, as well as learning outcome data, to consult with students about
their progress and learning goals.
Carson Middle School provided a flexible master schedule that emphasized student agency
over time. Students receive all their assigned work to be completed at the beginning of each
month, and develop a plan with teachers to structure learning time to achieve their learning
outcomes. Students could choose to do individual research, organize group inquiry projects, or
attend seminars. Students are held responsible for keeping on task and accomplishing what they
need to do within the provided timeframe. One student observed:
We have the choice really. In Math, for example, they will give us assignments in our
Google drive folder, and we have the choice if we want to get them done right away, and
then in seminars they help you learn something else but sometimes they can distract us
but usually you can skip out on because you already mastered that skill. Also you
could take your time, and usually every seminar you focus on one of the documents.
We get choice in how fast we go.
Some Carson students completed an entire years worth of math in one semester and have
moved on. These students work more independently than the others, asking for help when they
need it and checking in with the teacher when they are ready for an assessment. How students
spend their time is not left completely up to them. They are expected to attend daily whole-group
activities, and their elective classes meet on a regular schedule.
The freedom within fences idea described the organization models we observed in the IPL
schools. Many educators in a traditional school context would recognize the practices described
here as typical strategies to invite greater student ownership of their learning. However, in the
IPL schools, the small steps to create student agency over time expressed an underlying
commitment to personalized learning pedagogy. One Edison teacher said:
its a scaffolding process, and with our program, were really intentional about [it].
Ive seen a lot of programs that could totally model their program off of [ours], and
6

Personalization in Practice

itd look completely different. [Our program is] all based off of that first question What
are you going to learn? So we set up the parameters and kind of help them through that
mode. Because what weve found is that if we didnt have that [if] we didnt have our
[mission] it was a totally different experience for us.
The key lessons for us were the systemic efforts made by IPL educators to integrate agency
over time and pace throughout the program, the search for a balance between school structure
and student choice, and the persistent effort of educators in IPL schools to build on early
successes in student choice over time so as to expand opportunities for student agency in their
learning.
Designing for student responsibility. A culture of agency is also a culture of responsibility.
IPL schools prioritize the experience of failing to manage time as a feature (rather than a bug) of
the learning environment, and they foster schedule flexibility as a path to student pride in the
ability to manage time. Two Balsam Middle School students stated that teachers sort of gave
you all the necessary tools for [time management], but you have to learn it on your own. The
students who succeed are the ones who have it down to a really fine line and that You
ultimately have to get it to succeed here.
Carson Middle School students, for example, get a list of assignments to complete and they
have to plan their time to finish all the assignments. Asked what happens if they dont finish
them all, students responded, its your own fault and you have to try and get it done. A Carson
teacher explained how failure is part of the school design:
[We] let them fail. Its a huge piece of it. And I talked about that with all my families at
the beginning of the year at the listening conferenceespecially our new kidsis to say,
your child is going to fail. And theyre going to fail a lot. But we have the support in here
to help them recover from that. And I think that is so important. Especially with a lot of
kids that we have in our program, because up until this point theyve always been at the
top of their class and things have come very easy to themto have them come into an
experience where, initially right off the bat, theyre totally unsuccessful, but part of thats
by design. We want them to be unsuccessful so we can teach them how to be successful. I
think thats an important piece. (Emphasis added.)
Across the IPL schools, educators created situations for students to fail and to provide
sufficient feedback to learn from the consequences. Balsam High Schools principal noted that
he and his teachers have to fight the adult impulse to define every moment, and he highlights the
importance of Wednesday studio day:
Our staff has a tense relationship with studio day. But if you put too many structures into
studio day, youll never get the failure you need to have the students learn what happens
when I dont use my time well. And theres not enough failure in high school. So we
need to have structures taken away for the students so they can kind of fall on their faces.
So I think they learn it that way.
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Personalization in Practice

At face value, the statement theres not enough failure in high school looks strange, given
the challenges faced by so many students and educators to complete high school successfully. In
the context of the personalized learning pedagogy shared across the schools, however, the room
to fail takes on a different meaning. Failure in personalized learning is a step toward taking
responsibility for ones own learning. Failure, followed by feedback and renewed effort, is the
pathway toward successful personalized learning in IPL schools. Student agency begins with the
ability of students to make meaningful choices about where their learning will take place. A
central role for teachers in open spaces is to lead students toward making the choices that will
result in taking ownership over their learning. Facilitating student choice in the physical
environment is an initial step to creating a culture of student agency.
B. Agency over the Space of Learning
The physical layout of the learning environment is an important condition that IPL schools
establish for personalized learning. In our observations, we saw a commitment by the educators
in the IPL schools to design physical spaces that would afford students agency in participating in
learning activities. All five programs we visited had strong goals and philosophies that guided
their decisions about spaces. Whether this was making learning visible at Delaney or fostering
an arts community at Balsam, there was a sense that the program was embodied in the spaces. In
IPL learning spaces, students are encouraged to make decisions about where to learn and with
whom. We observed evidence of how the design of space created flexibility for teaching and
flexibility for students.
Flexibility for teaching. This design of flexible learning spaces creates a more fluid
environment for teaching. For example, Delaney teachers no longer have their own assigned
rooms; instead, they teach in several different spaces throughout the day. Common spaces are
shared and their use negotiated, sometimes in the moment. To provide flexibility in student
workspaces and teaching assignments, walls were taken down and classrooms merged or
adjusted. Teachers in all IPL schools moved around the classroom, perhaps to teach a seminar or
sit one-on-one with a student. There was no obvious front in most of the IPL classrooms we
observed. Other teachers worked simultaneously in the same spaces and made themselves
available for quick check-ins or to offer guidance.
Flexibility for students. The design of space creates a more flexible environment for
students. Students seem to move on their own as individuals rather than en masse, as
characterized by traditional schooling. Students enter and exit the classroom alone, seemingly
without adult permission. At Edison Elementary, the flexibility of the learning space addresses
the needs of special education students. A Edison teacher related how one student, who was
often in trouble in prior years, was allowed to organize his learning time. He splits his time
during the school day helping around the school and engaging in the classroom. The Edison
teachers believe that empowering him to use school spaces to meet his needs has helped his
efforts to learn at grade level and to participate successfully in learning activities.

Personalization in Practice

Carson Middle students are free to move among learning spaces whenever they want and
select the place that best suits their needs at the time, but here the norms and purposes are more
articulated, particularly with designated quiet spaces. Each school designated some spaces for
quiet study. The Delaney Middle School principal noted, what weve found with open spaces is
you still need quiet areas to focus. The culture in each school is strong enough that we saw
evidence of students monitoring and enforcing the social norms of their learning spaces.
One Delaney student reflected, the flexibility helps kids to be able to learn better and then
get things done by those deadlines because they dont, theyre not restricted to that learning
style, and they can go out and learn things on their own and they can tie it back and they can get
assignments done by the deadlines. Flexible space is an intentional design factor in IPL schools
because it creates the space to enact personalization pedagogy. In observations of how students
exercised agency over the time and space of learning, we found that the formula failure +
flexibility + feedback described a strategy to lead students to take responsibility over their own
learning.
C. Agency over the Content of Learning
A key principle of personalized learning is for student interest to inform the content of
learning. The emphasis on student control over the topic and direction of learning helps
distinguish personalized learning from, for example, individualized learning or differentiated
instruction (for a more developed discussion of the differences among personalization,
individualization, and differentiation, see the National Education Technology Plan, 2010, p. 12,
and Bray & McClaskey, 2013; table). Both individualization and differentiation tailor learning to
student needs and abilities, but do so for students. The choice over the means (activities) and
goals (outcomes) of personalized learning is done by students. This preference of by over for
learners is a defining aspect of personalized learning.
The challenge of designing learning by learners, instead of for learners, is located in a tension
between schooling and new media. The tension is found in the opposition between interestdriven and standards-driven learning outcomes. In traditional progressive school models,
learning is organized around student interests. Students participate with similarly interested
learners, or affinity groups, in order to master the ways of the discourse communities, in
which competent actors think, speak, and interact (for a compelling discussion of the concept of
an affinity group, see Gee & Hayes, 2009). Interest-based learning expands this by exposing
learners to new discourse communities to master, inviting learners to acquire new interests and
opportunities for mastery.
Standards-driven learning, on the other hand, is organized in terms of what schools,
professional organizations, policy makers and others think that students ought to know.
Schools are held accountable for the degree to which learners master the content guided by
standards. Students typically have little input in the development of what is considered worth
learning in a standards-driven environment. The work of educators is to develop learning

Personalization in Practice

environments and practices that persuade students that the standards-based learning is really in
their interests.
In our study, we experienced a range of strategies for how IPL schools invited students to
help determine the content of their learning. The general tendency was for schools to distinguish
between student control over choosing the means of learning vs. the goals of learning. Most
schools allowed a wide range of student choice over the means of learningover the activities
that filled the daily student schedules. However, most schools determined the goals of learning.
This balance allowed schools to design for interest-based learning in student choice over the
means, and standards-based, school-determined control over the ends of learning.
What does it mean for students to have a choice of means, but for schools to have a choice
over ends? When considering how traditional schools structure choice, students typically have
some control, with their families, over the kinds of classes they would like to take (required
course vs. electives), and, at a more basic level, the kinds of schools they attend, and whether to
participate in the learning activities provided by that school. The IPL schools presented several
additional dimensions of choice over the content of learning. These were bounded by parameters
or fencesthat were defined by pedagogical commitments of educators in the school. This
freedom within fences was expressed in two dimensions: daily activities, and the more elusive
choice over the outcomes of learning.
Choice over the daily activities of learning. All IPL schools presented examples of how
students organized the daily activities of their schedules. IPL students were observed
designing learning pathwaysthe means through which learning goals would be
accomplished. Even when targets were prescribed, students in personalized learning
environments exercised some control over the design of their learning pathways.
Anderson High students get a menu of activities at the beginning of each week. Students
use a computer-adaptive curriculum program to organize a variety of pathways toward learning
targets. Students do not have a choice about the required activities, but they are able to choose
the order in which they complete prescribed objectives. One educator described how its like
going to a restaurant: What will you have? You have to eat everything by the end of the week,
but what will you have today?
Edison Elementary students are given weekly learning targets on Google sheets, and then
they decide for themselves how to sequence the work. They can elect to attend seminars if they
believe they need extra instruction or support on a topic, work in small groups, or work
independently on computers or through individual study. Edison teachers monitor their students
productivity and steer them in productive directions when necessary. We saw one student sitting
on a couch and acting unsure about what to do. The teacher suggested that he should, reread the
story, and highlight it, so you can come to seminar ready. These interactions between agency
and guidance allow students to establish a network of support to make their decisions.

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Personalization in Practice

Carson Middle students also have control over the order and social aspects of daily learning
activities. While there are some required activities throughout the day (all-school meetings, silent
reading time, etc.), there is also a large amount of free-choice time. Students can decide if they
want to work on their tasks independently or in small groups. Collaboration can range from
simply asking peers for their opinions, to discussing content with the aid of whiteboards, to
producing a product together. But Carson students also recognize the standards-based
boundaries. During an interview, two students discussed where their agency comes to the fore
during their learning processes:
Student 1: You still have to follow the standards for Common Core.
Student 2: So, for example, in science and social studies we are all doing the same things.
We all take the same tests and basically do the same assignments. Um, the freedom that
we have in it is the resources we use, and then if we do any projects like a presentation,
for example. We get to choose what aspect of that unit we want to explore more into.
As one teacher explained, while most students follow the teacher-selected curriculum, there
are alternatives for students who dont feel like the options suit their needs. Choice over the
nature and sequence of learning activities is seen as an important step toward helping students
take agency over their work.
Choice over outcomes of learning. IPL students may have some choice over learning
activities, but, as they are still public school learning environments, standards continue to rule
over learning outcomes. The accountability policies of the past 20 years require schools to
organize learning in terms of content standards. Mandatory standardized tests for public school
students also reign in the world of personalized learning. Each school in our sample regarded
state tests as a required metric of quality for all students. The Northwest Evaluation
Associations Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) is used across the schools as a tool to
provide just-in-time measures to inform a variety of decisions about designing the student
learning program. Anderson High, for example, used MAP to admit students into its personalized
learning program, group students for learning activities, assess the progress students were
making, and determine when students could return to the mainstream academic program.
Outside of literacy and math standards, however, students have more choice about their
learning outcomes. In many schools, science and social studies classes can be repurposed by
educators to serve as further occasions for students to develop basic literacy skills (e.g., Au
2007). Some IPL schools used these subjects, along with the arts and business, as opportunities
for students to design their own learning outcomes.
Carson Middle students, for example, have freedom to choose the means and the goals of
their learning with their 20% project (modeled after Googles successful program by the same

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Personalization in Practice

name3). We observed an assignment where students were invited to develop new media
representations in their 20% project. Students talked about their choice over representing
outcomes:
Student 1: You get to choose how you present it, like some people make like a musical,
or they did a play to kinda show what they had done.
Student 2: And people can make a presentation, a poster
Student 3: A model
Student 4: Anything!
They are tasked with making a difference in the community by finding a way to complete
this sentence: Wouldnt it be cool if? and have control over their choice of topic, research
methods, and summative presentation so long as the project is connected somehow to or with an
external community partner. When one student at Carson talks about his 20% project, he gets
excited about the process hes planned: Im building my own vending machine actually. And
Im modeling it first, and Im kind of using a blueprint to model it out, and then Im going to
build it. Im not going to go right into building, Im probably going to model it, and then get all
of my supplies.
Delaney Middle School students can choose the topic and format of long-term writing
projects. One student decided to write about homelessnessan issue about which she is very
curiousand plans to send her essay to the government office to request action on her findings.
Delaney students can choose a world culture/art or business pathway and design a project to
achieve the learning goals they specify. They then partner with someone from the other
art/business track. Each group is given resources to produce a tangible product. They then pitch
their idea to a community of entrepreneurs. The project ensures that students see their initial
interests to fruition and enables them to experience what it is like to turn an artistic inspiration
into a marketable product.
Balsam High School comes closest to an interest-based learning goal model for students. All
Balsam students choose the path and the proficiencies for their learning. Students consult with
teachers to maintain an e-portfolio that allows them to organize the kinds of expertise they need
to achieve their learning goals and to assemble a coherent selection of proficiencies that serve as
graduation outcomes. Balsam students not only select from available seminars, they also work
with teachers to develop seminars that can be taught by teams of students and teachers. This
flexible approach to what needs to be learned reflects the Balsam approach to student agency
over learning outcomes.

For a brief overview, see http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/jobs/21pre.html?_r=0; and

http://www.iteachithink.com/2012/07/give-your-students-20-time-to-do.html

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Personalization in Practice

Even at Balsam, though, standardized proficiencies in math and literacy are required. Balsam
teachers work with students to seamlessly integrate the required outcomes into interest-based
learning trajectories. For example, a math, an English, and a social studies teacher developed a
seminar in gamificationusing the principles of game design to make other kinds of social
activities engaging. One student, who had been struggling with the program, used his passion for
massively open online gaming to engage in the new course development. Through calculating
the background models for game success (e.g., theory-crafting; for a discussion of theorycrafting, see Choonatanom & Nardi, 2012), the student was able to advance toward his learning
proficiencies as well as make progress toward his Algebra 2 learning goals. These kinds of
collaborative practices help Balsam educators and students balance student interest with required
school outcomes.
IPL educators develop learning environments that encourage student agency around the time,
place, pace, space and outcomes of learning. As public schools, however, IPL educators continue
to take responsibility for guiding students toward socially required outcomes. All learning
environments have features that can be used to enhance or to diminish learner agency. IPL
educators see the design challenge in terms of how to use the environment to develop a culture in
which learners can take control of their learning process.
Question 2. How Do IPL Schools Shift the Role of Educators to Support Personalization?
Personalized learning opens up new possibilities for the role of teachers in student learning.
The pedagogical commitments of personalized learning require teachers to reframe their role
from presenters to facilitators of information. When teachers help students design personalized
learning plans, their role is to support learner efforts to assemble meaningful learning
opportunities, and to guide students toward the ability to make good choices about their learning.
This is not to say that teachers abandon their conventional role as presenters of information. It
does suggest, though, that teachers use their time for presentation as a complement to student
efforts to organize learning activities, rather than the main event of classroom activity.
The issue we explore in this section involves the changing role of the teacher in personalized
learning schools. Our research led us to a key insight about a change in the relation of teachers
and students in the IPL schoolsthe role of consultation in the design of the learning plans and
goals.
Consultations with Students
Our research with the IPL schools points to an intriguing new development in how teachers
use data to inform instruction. In the past decade, teachers were able to integrate new sources of
information about students into learning plans for students. The IPL schools are beginning to
provide evidence that teachers are using data to construct learning plans with students. This shift
from planning for students to planning with students is consistent with our observations about the
IPL schools commitment to spark student agency in the learning environment.

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Personalization in Practice

We observed teachers consulting with students to design learning plans. Each school
implemented some form of one-on-one conference or advising time that resulted inand was
then guided bya personal learning plan.
Each Carson Middle student meets weekly with a teacher. The discussions range from
progress on learning goals to problems with particular assignments. Other teachers in the
program can leave notes for the advisor to talk through. The advisor documents the conversation
in a Google doc and helps troubleshoot issues and guide students. The consultation concludes
with a revised set of instructional goals for the student to achieve that weekwhich serves as the
personalized learning plan.
Edison Elementary teachers have daily data meetings to review running records, high
frequency words, and skill mastery, along with approximately five other indicators. Consultation
focuses on presenting the results of these meetings to help students reflect upon progress and
design of learning goals. Edison teachers call this time conferring and emphasize that it is at
the heart of developing the student-teacher relationship. One teacher explains that conferring is
the place where students construct individual goals, and they can work toward those goals at
their own individual pace, so you can make sure that this student understands a concept
before they go on to the next concept.
Balsam High students have weekly consultations in their mentor groups, which include oneon-one talks with their mentor. Balsam consultation has a virtual componentthe school
instructional information environmentwhich tracks participation, portfolio contributions,
scheduling and goal setting. In-person and online consultation supports students in making
decisions on how to manage their time as well as allows advisors to document progress and flag
concerns.
Consultations serve as opportunities for students to have more independent assistance with
their work and get help from teachers at the students level. These individual conferences also
guide the students and teachers in deciding the pace and path of students learning by working on
their individual learning plan.
Data-driven Discussions
The data used in conferences in the elementary and middle schools were typically presented
in terms of how teachers interpreted the information for student learning plans and goals. In the
high schools, we observed more direct interactions between teachers and students around the
learning data collected by educators in the school.
At Anderson High School, students review results of their MAP tests with educators.
Students are expected to use their achievement data to structure the interaction with teachers (and
parents) to explain their progress. Consultation at Anderson focuses on the continuous
development of this data-driven portfolio, which eventually includes college and career
documents, such as a resume, letters of recommendation, and personal essays.

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Personalization in Practice

Consultation at Balsam holds students responsible for interpreting and presenting the results
of achievement data to educators. For example, the ALEKS computer-adaptive math curriculum
program generates data on student progress. The math teacher teaches specific seminars on
specific math content. Students work through ALEKS to show mastery. Students monitor their
progress at their dashboard, which shows the amount of hours spent each week as well as how
many targets have been attempted and accomplished. While the teacher uses the aggregate data
in ALEKS to determine when to teach mini-lessons on the content, students interpret and
present their outcome results as evidence of progress to teachers in consultation.
In each of these cases we observed how instructional planning is reframed as an activity with
students. Further, as we observed in the high school settings, the same data used by teachers to
measure student progress are also what students use to make a case for their instructional plans
and progress. This is not to say that instructional planning unfolds only among teachers and
students. Our conversations revealed that much of teacher preparation time is dedicated to
organizing this collaborative work among students and colleagues around data.
Consultation served as a foundation for integrating formative assessment into the teacherstudent interaction. A Balsam teacher talked about the sheer number of interactions over the
course of the year that built this foundation: [we have] lots of online conversations at [Balsam]:
I would say its a thousand conversations. Or even electronic conversations. If theyre typing
something formally on Google docs, Im commenting and sending it back for revisions. In the
IPL schools, the number of interactions around teacher-student consultation about the means and
the goals of learning, as well as about data on progress indicators, is intended to shift the nature
of the interaction toward helping students become equal partners in their learning.
Question 3. How Are Learning Technologies used in IPL Schools?
Each of the IPL schools used learning technologies to create what we called socio-technical
ecologies. Instead of thinking of digital devices and programs as add-ons to an existing
instructional program, each IPL school selected and integrated tools into a coherent approach to
transform teaching and learning. In some cases, organizations were already moving toward new
practices, and technologies extended the application of these initiatives; in other cases, the
technologies themselves sparked new approaches. Mature socio-technical ecologies develop
routines that allow actors to collaboratively focus on the work of the organizationin this case,
teaching and learningrather than on the features or limitations of the tools.
New media technologies played a central role in allowing schools to manage data, coordinate
instruction, and open classrooms into the wide world of real-life learning opportunities.
However, as we were consistently reminded in our research, these new tools could serve learning
needs when situated in schools organized around powerful pedagogical commitments to
personalizing learning for all students. As a Carson teacher explained: technology supports the
model, but it doesnt define it. This is a pedagogically driven innovation and technology helps
manage the information and take it to scale.

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Personalization in Practice

As we discuss below, educators and students used these tools together to create sociotechnical ecologies around personalized learning. At a general level, the technologies were used
to organize independent student learning that created time and space for educators to engage in
consultation and facilitation activities with students. The technologies, especially the computeradaptive tools in math and reading, expanded the power of educators to provide meaningful
differentiation in the classroom space. The technologies bought space and time for the kinds of
customized learning activities that define quality-differentiated learning. In the following
sections, we provide examples of how each kind of technology looked in practice.
In the socio-technical systems we observed, learning technologies served several key
functions:

a reliable network of information management and productivity tools to support the

day-to-day work of both educators and students;

computer-adaptive assessment and curriculum programs that individuated skill and

content development learning in math and reading;

digital media spaces to foster creativity in activities such as gaming, coding,

performance, production and making.

A. Information Management and Productivity Tools

Like most 21st century organizations, the IPL schools were awash with digital technology
tools. Each school had programs for student information, scheduling, productivity, portfolios,
assessment and creativity, on a number of different platforms including computers and mobile
devices.4 Table 2 provides an overview of the tools that we observed in practice across the IPL
schools.
There are several interesting insights about the range of technologies in use in IPL schools.
The diversity of tools reflects a user-controlled (vs. vendor-controlled) marketplace in which IPL
schools select tools from a variety of vendors for a variety of purposes. The availability of
toolsmany of them free to useencourages educators to experiment with tools that meet the
needs of teaching and learning. The peer communities in which IPL educators participate
(facilitated, in part, by the IPL) also act as recommendation engines to consider the kinds of
tools already being used in other schools. Finally, increasing platform-independence of many of
these tools invites schools to develop a constellation of technologies where educators (and

By and large, schools took the responsibility for providing technologies for learning to their students. However,
three of the schools discussed Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies for students to use technologies from home
to complement the tools provided by the school.

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Personalization in Practice

learners) can select the tools that fit teaching and learning needs. These tools complement and
extend the environment the school can provide to support student learning.5
Table 2. IPL School Technologies
Productivity
Google Docs
Microsoft Office
Notability
Google Sheets
Google Form
Google Presentation
Keynote
Powerpoint
Prezi
iMovie
Weebly Website

Learning
Management
MyLC
Google Classroom
ClassDojo
Remind 101
Epiphany Learning
Career Cruising
Project Foundry

Computer Adaptive
Learning (CAL)
Achieve3000
Odyssey
Acellus
ALEKS
Think Cerca
Core5 (Lexia)
Edgenuity
TenMarks

Assessment
ACT Aspire
MAP
A+ Test Often
Pathbrite

IXL
DreamBox
Khan Academy

Content
BrainPoP
RAZ Kids
News-o-matic
Newsela
YouTube
Free Rice
Coursera
BuzzMath
Discovery
Techbook
Everfi

B. Computer Adaptive Assessment and Curriculum Programs

All of the IPL schools used some kind of computer-adaptive learning (CAL) tools. These
have become popular in many schools as a way to provide quality instructional activities at the
level at which the student is learning. CAL tools build on research in cognitive tutoring and
learning trajectories to assess the current skill level of the student and provide instructional
examples and suggestions that guide learners toward desired outcomes (for a review of the
history and current applications of cognitive tutoring tools to support teaching and learning, see
Dede, 2014 and Koedinger & Corbett, 2006; for a discussion of research on learning trajectories,
see Daro, Mosher, & Corcoran 2011). Programs such as Achieve3000, DreamBox Math,
TenMarks, ALEKS Math, and Khan Academy all use aspects of CAL research to create
engaging learning pathways for students. Automating the instructional trajectory allows students
to progress at their own pace in a customized learning space.
CAL and differentiation. The schools use of CAL tools in everyday practice reminded us of
a next generation of differentiated learning practices. Differentiation emerged as an instructional

A further research question would be to document the tools that educators and learners use that may not be
supported explicitly by the school. New media learning is marked by the ability of learners to design their own
environments from the social media, information, making and communication technologies used in everyday life. In
a traditional model, the schools are responsible for supplying the learning environment and resources for students. In
new media environments, successful learners assemble their own learning environments out of tools both provided
by the institution and available in general circulation. It would be interesting to know the kinds of tools learners use
to complement what schools provide in personalized learning environments (maybe in comparison to students in
traditional education environments).

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Personalization in Practice

strategy in the 1990s to meet the different learning needs of students in an inclusive environment.
However, effectively implementing differentiation in classrooms stretched the ability of many
teachers to adequately assess and address the wide variety of learner needs in the design of
everyday lessons (for a discussion of the research on differentiation as an instructional strategy,
see Subban, 2006; also see Delisle, 2015 for a discussion of the difficulties of successfully
implementing differentiation in classrooms). IPL schools primarily used CAL tools to create
autonomous learning stations in classrooms where some students would engage in selfdirected activities while others worked directly with teachers (or with one another). In effect,
CAL technologies allowed teachers to offload some of the diagnostic and instructional demand
for differentiating learning onto programs designed around students demonstrated needs. This
usage led us to think of CAL integration as a new form of differentiated instruction that engaged
students in technology-driven learning activities as a method of providing quality learning
experiences while redirecting teacher attention to students with other learning needs.
In several of the IPL schools, students would use CAL programs to create learning pathways
in math or reading, and accessed the programs during the school day (and often at home) to
practice core skills. The CAL system tracked student progress and reported to both students and
teachers about where students struggled and where they were succeeding. Educators could then
use time freed up by CAL programs in several ways. Sometimes when teachers noticed that
many students were struggling with a particular concept they organized a lesson to discuss the
idea. Other times teachers used the time students spent on CAL programs to engage in
consultation with other students.
Several IPL teachers spoke about the power of CAL tools for teaching. One Balsam teacher
said, for every teacher that gets concerned about the role of technology, I would say that
actually the technology makes the teacher more relevant and more valuable in the class, not
less. Providing diagnostic information on trends in student understanding allows teachers to
focus on where help is needed by spending teaching time actually teaching relevant content and
then allowing students to work through the program toward mastery. Using the CAL tools meant
that some teachers did not spend as much time creating tests or grading. Students used data from
the system to monitor progress at the program dashboard, which shows the amount of hours
spent each week as well as how many targets have been attempted and accomplished.
Limits of CAL tools. There were limits to the effectiveness of using the CAL programs as
stand-alone learning tools in the IPL schools. First, CAL programs only existed in certain subject
areas. In our observations, CAL programs were used most widely in math, with several programs
(Achieve3000, for example) used in reading, but few options for content areas such as science,
social studies and the arts. The limited scope meant schools that relied on CAL programs as
primary learning technologies taught without analogous tools in other subject areas.
Another limitation was on the depth of instruction. A Delaney student said that the CAL
program skims the surface, it doesnt go as in-depth as the teachers would like. Teachers use [it]
to determine what they are going to teach, they go in-depth with it. Other educators felt that the

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Personalization in Practice

programs were good for review and skill development, but that the real teaching and learning
needed to happen outside the CAL environment. We consistently found that educators used the
instructional applications as starting points of learning. At Balsam, the science teacher
introduced the basic concept of the lesson first, and then used questions like What have you got
so far, Are you on the right track, Let me read what you have so far Okay, try this, go into
this classroomyoure skirting the whys and hows that I want you to get to. (We saw similar
examples at Carson, Edison, and Delaney.) The CAL technologies were often used to set up
situations for in-depth learning of both content and the learning process itself in which both
educators and students could work in their zone of proximal development. In these cases,
teachers were able to differentiate their instruction by drawing on a more nuanced understanding
of what their students knew and where students needed to be challenged.
C. The Next Frontier: Digital Media Spaces
IPL schools also provided student access to new media design and distribution of tools such
as iMovie, YouTube, Keynote and websites that helped students structure and distribute creative
work. However, we did not observe many occasions where students were engaged in activities
organized around media production and distribution. These activities appear to be on the horizon
of the personalized learning environments we observed and may point to a future state for
learners to truly direct their own learning in self-organized social and technical worlds.
Such a future may be distant for any schooleven personalized learning schools. But this
future is alive and present in learning environments outside of schools. Many technology
enthusiasts use the ideas of participatory cultures and new literacies to describe these exciting
learning spaces. Participatory cultures characterize the forms of social interaction that often arise
around engagement with new media (see Jenkins, Purushotma, Clinton, Weigel, & Robison,
2007). These cultures are self-organizing communities that serve the interests of members:
with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support
for creating and sharing ones creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby
what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. (p. 3)
Participatory cultures typically develop around entertainment media such as video games, fan
fiction, fantasy sports, social media, maker spaces and media production and sharing
environments. Successful participation inducts learners into new practices, knowledge and values
that come to form an aspect of the identity of learners. Successful learners become adept in new
literacies that emphasize production and communication as a pathway to grammar and
vocabulary development (see Lankshear & Knobel, 2006).
Both participatory cultures and new literacies rest on the concept of interest as the primary
motive for engagement. Learners invest in new cultures to learn how to think, create and interact
in ways that allow them to pursue their interests. Although many of the IPL schools allowed for
some forms of digital media production, many of these activities were at the margin of the
schools effort to cultivate traditional literacy and math learning. In part, this resulted from the

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Personalization in Practice

prevailing school interest in guiding students to succeed on the same standards-based tests used
by all schools. It is difficult to form participatory cultures in schools where learning is defined by
standards, where learners ultimately have little input into the overall goals of their learning.
Digital media and assessment. Assessment of learning was one area where we saw student
engagement with new media tools across schools. In each school, we observed students choosing
how to represent their understanding (in certain assignments). Many students chose new media
technologies to make their learning visible. Their ease of use of sophisticated programs allowed
even elementary school-aged children to record, produce, and broadcast video and to create
websites as assessments of learning. For example, Edison Elementary students were observed
creating videos with iMovie and websites with Weebly. A Carson teacher describes this new
media approach to student self-assessment:
We like them to be as creative as possible, and thatsthats a process that gets
developed with them as well. When they first come in, pretty much all of them do
PowerPoints. And then we gradually start to get kids who want to push the bar more,
as far as what they want to do. Weve had a couple students who have really challenged
us artistically with the way that they do things. In the end, theyll always have the
option to do something different than what we give them. So if I gave them the comic
book and they really didnt want to do it, totally fine with that. They can do it some other
way. The idea being as long as we can judge it by the same rubric, totally fine with that.
So we get kids who will push the bar a little bit more. Some of them are really
comfortable and fine doing a traditional assessment, which is fine too. (Emphasis added.)
This quote illustrates how, in assessment as well, personalized learning teachers sought to
balance standards-based demands of schooling with the interest-based motives of personalized
learning. Digital tools provided students with a range of media to express their understanding,
while the quality of the representation is measured by the standards-based rubric.
Balsams participatory culture. Balsam High School came closest to encouraging learners
to use digital media across the school to engage in participatory cultures and learning new
literacies. Balsam is an arts-based school organized around seminars aimed at developing a wide
range of proficiencies. Balsam students begin by selecting a focus of interest: writing,
performing arts, music, or art. This focus becomes more narrowed to the students specific
interest as they progress. In consultation with their teacher mentor, students pursue their required
competencies by signing up for a variety of seminars. Even within teacher-designed seminars,
students are encouraged to set proficiency goals that meet their unique needs in the context of the
course.
Every seminar promotes students to pursue social and technical learning activities. Most of
the language arts, social studies, and arts classes give students a wide range to explore their
creative interests. Customization occurs at the individual, classroom, and school level. One
Balsam student describes how

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Personalization in Practice

people here actually have a passion for what theyre doing. And the way the classes are
created, its so that the students are all interested in whats actually happening. Were
allowed to suggest things for seminars. I went with my family and saw the Kofi dance
company, and I mentioned it to one of our teachers, and now theyre doing a seminar next
series!
Students have input in not only their own assessments but also in course offerings and how
the school operates as a whole. Students organize their work and coordinate feedback with
mentors through the MyLC learning management tools that track plans, goals and achievements.
Balsam teachers use the MyLC tools to check in with students to determine if theyve developed
their own timeline, designated their final project, and are making progress. Teachers and students
value developing students as agents in the design of learning plans that involve students and
tools in a socio-technical community.
Is the learning environment at Balsam a participatory culture? In many ways, the Balsam
learning environment reflects the central themes of participatory cultures. Participants engage in
social interaction around shared learning goals that reflect the interests of the learners.
Production in terms of the goals of the seminars is rewarded as successful students become
known as valued members of the community in the school. Beyond the CAL model, learning is
defined at Balsam in terms of participation in a larger culture and acquiring new interaction
proficiencies.
There are two key differences between the learning environment at Balsam and authentic
participatory cultures. First, the requirement that students weave topics (such as math
competencies) into their learning plans suggests that the ultimate control of learning goals still
belongs to the system, rather than the learner. Second, the learning communities at Balsam are
internal to the school. The wide-ranging, multi-age and multi-ability cultures of, for example,
massively multiplayer online games and citizen science, stretch far beyond the walls of a
particular classroom to include incredibly diverse participants from around the world.
Constraining the learning environment in terms of outcomes and location positions the Balsam
environment on the way toward, but not quite in, the world of participatory cultures. Genuinely
learner-directed participatory cultures seem still beyond the reach of the personalized learning
designs of the schools in our study.
Conclusion
This report documents several aspects of personalized learning in practice at five public
schools. We found that educators in the IPL schools sought to create cultures of agency among
students, engaged in regular consultations with students to collaboratively establish learning
plans, and developed socio-technical ecologies that integrated learning technologies into the
everyday practices of teaching and learning. We were impressed with the dedication and skill of
the educators in the IPL schools, as well as the abilities of the students to speak about their roles
in their own education.

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Personalization in Practice

The idea of balance, of freedom within fences, pervaded the data we collected across the
schools. Each school seemed to understand itself as living in two worldsthe world of
standards-based education where teachers and students worked together to achieve state and
district mandated learning outcomes, and the world of interest-based learning where student
agency contributed to organizing the time, space, means and (sometimes) the ends of learning.
Each school worked toward building the capacity for student voice and choicea culture of
agencythat was supported by the design of technology-rich learning spaces. These schools
included many of the characteristics of traditional public schoolsdisciplinary learning, school
information systems, teacher evaluation, special education and behavior management issues.
However, our brief visits enabled us to begin to understand how a powerful pedagogical vision
of high standards and student agency was helping transform these traditional school features into
an exciting approach to the design of learning environments for all students.
Because this is a preliminary study, there are many limitations to our conclusions. We need
to spend more time in each school and to find the educators and students who did not experience
success as well as those who benefited from personalized learning practices. We will need to ask
further questions such as:

How do teachers assemble technologies and resources to create the personalized learning
environments?

How (and whether) the practices of personalized learning benefit students who
traditionally struggle in schools?

What is the relation between personalized learning and initiatives such as special
education, Response to Intervention and Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports?

What is the role that the regional change agent (IPL) played in shaping local school
practices?

What are the political costs of large-scale implementation of personalized learning in

traditional schools?

What are the ways in which students experience their education outside of the school
setting?

What is the role of the arts (and more broadly, informal learning spaces) in the design of
personalized learning?

How can we prepare and support teachers to facilitate personalized learning?

How can we support personalized learning students to succeed at the next stages of their
schooling?

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Personalization in Practice

Most importantly, we will continue to pursue the relation of each of the practices we
identified to improving student outcomesboth in terms of standardized test performance and
other measures, such as persistence in school and non-cognitive measures, that shape the
learning outcomes for students and educators in IPL schools. We will continue to refine the
practices identified here into indicators that can be correlated to performance measures and used
as a guiding model for schools on the pathway to personalized learning.
The dream of many educatorsin and out of schoolsis to adapt the power of new media
technologies for learning to the day-to-day practices of schools. This dream has looked quite
distant in recent years. In his book The Anti-Education Era (2013), James Paul Gee is not
optimistic about the potential of schools embrace the potential of new media learning tools. Gee
argues that the school tendency to adopt technologies that optimize learning to meet existing
system goalsfrom data management systems to cognitive tutorscreates increasingly artificial
education spaces where students learn to avoid the challenges of tangling with ill-structured
problems and open-ended collaboration so vital to 21st century learning.
Gee noted how the appropriation of digital media technologies in the early 2000s seemed to
lead schools down a path where the system goals (e.g., improving outcome scores) outweighed
the value of using technologies as learning tools to face bigger social problems. While the
schools in our report continued to use technologies to optimize standards-based learning
outcomes, throughout our study we saw evidence that the kinds of self-directed, socially engaged
habits of learning so desperately needed to address the messy social, political and scientific
questions of our time can indeed be cultivated in our public schools. We look forward to
continuing the research so that we can both trace these practices in depth and communicate them
in ways that allow educators and students to chart a hopeful course for the future of education.

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Appendix
The results we present here are from the pilot phase of a 2-year study designed to document
what personalized learning looks like in practice. The study is supported by the University of
WisconsinMadison School of Education and the Joyce Foundation, and is designed to
document teaching and learning practices in 1824 personalized learning schools locally and
across the country.
In this pilot phase, our research team visited five personalized learning schools between
February and May 2015. Schools were identified by peers and a regional network for their
implementation of personalized learning practices. The schools were chosen to represent urban
and suburban settings and included an elementary school, two middle schools, and two high
schools. All were public schools, one was a program school (a school within a school), and two
were public charter schools. The school-within-a-school model had only a few fulltime
equivalent (FTE) teachers while other schools we studied reached more than 70 FTE, in addition
to numerous part-time, support, and administrative staff.
We spent 34 days in each school, getting to know the people and practices that shaped dayto-day teaching and learning. Over the course of the pilot, researchers observed 22 classrooms
and conducted 23 interviews with 33 students and parents. The data we collected provided a
snapshot of the typical organization of practices in each school. Table A1 outlines the types of
data collected by our team to date.
Table A1. Data Collection from the Five Study Schools
Teachers
Interviewed

Leaders
Interviewed

Students
interviewed

Observations
conducted

Parents
Interviewed

Anderson HS

Balsam HS

Carson Academy MS

Delaney Academy MS

Edison Elementary

(Pseudonyms)

Interviews were conducted using a semi-structured interview protocol focusing on practices
at the participants respective level. Observations were conducted using an observation protocol.
Data collection is ongoing. The goal is to conduct more interviews with parents and students and
more observations in each school.
The research team developed 1,199 pages of field notes, transcriptions, descriptions and
graphics of our visits, which were compiled and coded in the MaxQDA qualitative data analysis
system. Data was initially coded to examine practices at the student, teacher, and school levels.

A1

Personalization in Practice

From this data we looked for emerging themes to identify distinguishing characteristics of
personalized learning environments. The initial coding was guided by our Personalized Learning
Framework document:
At the Student Level, we coded for:

the agency students have for their work (to what degree is the work designed for learners
or by learners?);

the features of the student personalized learning plan/profile (how is it developed,

refined and assessed?); and

the degree to which the learner activities are guided by student interests or the outcome
requirements of the school instructional program.

At the Teacher Level, we coded for:

how teachers know students have achieved learning goals (how do teachers balance
summative and formative assessment, and what role do student representations of their
work play in assessing learning);

the degree to which teacher work enacted as instruction (direct presentation of material
to passive student recipients) or facilitation (guiding students through self-directed
inquiry); and

the degree to which teachers engage in collaborative planning, teaching and

assessment with colleagues in and out of the classroom.

At the School Level, we coded for:

The role that learning technologies play in facilitating learning in and out of the
classroom (the role of 1:1 initiatives; learning management systems; computer-adaptive
testing and curriculum systems; virtual environments to design and share student work);

How new teachers are hired, trained and inducted into personalized school programs;

How teachers engage in professional learning activities within and outside the school;
and

How the construction of the school master schedule for teachers, students and spaces
affords or constrains personalized learning activities.

At the Community Level, we coded for:

How district policies afford or constrain personalized learning efforts;

A2

Personalization in Practice

How regional organizations and/or professional associations influence local

personalized learning initiatives; and

How parent and business communities perceive the advantages and disadvantages of
personalized learning schools.

This discussion was drawn from this initial pass through the data. The findings that we
present will form hypotheses for the next phase of the study in which we explore the degree to
which the inferences made here characterize the practices of the larger sample of schools.

A3

Copyright 2015 by Rich Halverson, Al Barnicle, Sarah Hackett, Tanushree Rawat, Julia
Rutledge, Julie Kallio, Curt Mould, and Janice Mertes
All rights reserved.
Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for noncommercial purposes by any means,
provided that the above copyright notice appears on all copies. WCER working papers are
available on the Internet at http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/publications/workingPapers/index.php.
Any opinions, findings, or conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not
necessarily reflect the views of the funding agencies, WCER, or cooperating institutions.